Thursday, July 29, 2010

I've got my own URL, and a web host, and an about page, and everything!

It's over at www.robertcroman.com. I'll be blogging over there for now, although if I get enough complaints about making people's heads pop, I may put the head-poppy stuff over here.

Of course, I'm still working on simul-posting, but the Ur-Goth hasn't found a good plug in for that yet.

REMEMBER! Fae Eye is available on the 1st, Road Mage is available on the 16th! Go, go, go, go, go and see! And buy them! There's a contest for a free Kindle! I may add another contest soon for some character based artwork! Really! I'm excited, I need to calm down before I run out of exclamation points!

Monday, July 26, 2010

Six more days until Fae Eye is out! I saw the galleys today, I'm bursting with excitement.

Ok, that sounded incredibly corny to me, and I said it. Still, it's not untrue.

In other news, Crowbar Girl is now at 75,000 words. Added another 1980 words today, which looks to be about how many I'm doing a day when I really get into it. I'd do more, but I don't seem to really hit my stride until about an hour after the kids are in bed.

Friday, July 23, 2010

I've been getting advice from PJ lately about social media, and one of her comments was that she knew I was going to be published soon, so she was pushing me to go out and make connections.

I realized just today why I hadn't. I've been 'on the cusp' of being published for around five years. Worse, I seem to have started there. I've never received a form rejection from a publisher, and over half of the non-form rejections had suggestions, edits, and encouragement tacked on. I've been told that those are Really Good Signs. Almost There signs. Things that tell you you've almost made it.

With that in mind, around five years ago I went out and did just what PJ is talking about. Lurked on writing and publishing sites, commented cogently when I could, built up an online presence, such as it was. Then... Nothing. For five years, over and over, the same kind of responses. Tried for an agent, got similar responses. 'Great work, but not what we're looking for.' 'Really, really cool and well written, but didn't quite grab us enough.'

After a while, I wrote off the 'cusp of being published' as wishful thinking. Note; I didn't stop writing or submitting. On the contrary, I actively looked for venues and honed my craft. I improved; I can see problems with my earlier stories, I can improve them now. But all my writing time was taken away from work time, kid time, wife time and sleeping time. I wound up dropping the net-presence in favor of writing more, writing better, writing faster.

The whole time, five years, there was NO progress. I kept getting the same type of rejections. Part of the problem, I'm convinced, was the lack of rote rejections prior; if you're aiming at 10, and your first effort is '1', the next is '2', and the next is '3', you become convinced that you can hit '10' if you put in enough work. I started at '9' and saw a vague wobble between '9' and '8' (with one notable dip to '7') for five years. Very discouraging. By this past summer, I had hit a state where the only way I could cope was to tell myself that 'of course I'll get a rejection, but at least the feedback will be helpful'.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

It's been pointed out to me recently that I write rather a lot, in the 'many words in a short time' sense. At the same time, others have pointed out that the stuff that I write is actually relatively good from a grammar / spelling / typo point of view. (Thanks to fellow author Maynely a Mystery and editor Kate Richards respectively for the compliments!) The second means I'm not just getting hypergraphia of the keyboard in the first, and Maynely asked for a few tips, and I realized that there ARE some things I've picked up, so here goes...

A quick note before I start - these are in no particular order. There is no 'Silver Bullet'. Every person who sets out to write has challenges; any of these tips may overcome any particular challenge, or none of them may overcome the particular challenge you're facing at the moment. tl;dr, ymmv. Some I've come up with on my own, some I've distilled from others, some I've stolen entire.

- In the words of Mr. Spann, 'perfection is something made up to scare people'. Don't be intimidated. If you can't find the perfect word, put some wrong ones on the page. If the ideas behind them are good, those ideas will shine through anyway. I can't count the number of pages where I was disappointed by some prose, but other people were wowed.

- Writing every day makes your word count go up. I found out during NaNoWriMo that my average word count per hour goes up drastically when I'm writing every day. Instead of spending time fooling about, I put words on the page. OK, I still fool about, but the fool about to writing ratio gets better.

- Distractions are fine as long as you keep getting back to the writing. Sitting down with NO distractions might be an interesting idea, but it's both hard to manage and if you're not 'in the zone' leave you nothing to spark your creativity. Have some toys nearby, electronic or otherwise. Try to avoid mentally intensive chores, but physical ones are ok unless they're all-day, no-break items. Laundry is good if you use machines. Type 30 minutes, cycle laundry, rinse and repeat.

- Avoid physical writing distractions. I'm working with a very sticky keyboard right now, and it's dropping my writing speed by about 25-45%. Mostly due to the space bar requiring a serious MASH to detect a space bar stroke. Any type of ergonomic or physical distraction needs to GO.

- Plot things out beforehand. My fellow NaNo writers tend to sit down and write. Because of that, they have NO idea where their plots are going, which means they write themselves into corners. A lot. They complain of writer's block. A lot. And they can't get started. A lot. You don't even really need anything formal. I was reading this fabulous interview with Ted Chiang today, and I work similarly to the way he does; I have all the key scenes in my head before I start. If you have those, it's just a matter of hooking them together. Note that key scenes are typically big, important, 'if the movie doesn't have this the fans will riot' scenes. They aren't usually deathless prose, because the ideas in them are so strong.

- Practice active writing meditation with multimedia support. OK, that sounds like marketing jargon, but it's not. When you can't be writing because, say, your hands are full of a car steering wheel, but you aren't mentally engaged because, say, you drive this route every day five days a week, think about your story. Those key scenes? Play them in that little mental movie theater. Same with good dialogue. Same with plotlines. Workouts are another great time for this. The 'multimedia' part is simple; get music that puts you in the right mood for the story and play it while pondering, then play it when you sit down to write. It will help you get back in the same head space as you were when all those good ideas came to you.

OK, that's about it for now. I've got to get the kids to bed, work out and get some more words on the page tonight (possible marathon tonight / tomorrow). Hope some or all of this helps!

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Wrote another 2300 words done on Crowbar Girl tonight. Also, finally got to the point after which everything is fairly tightly plotted out.

What's really odd is that I was sitting there writing tonight, wondering when I'd GET to that point, when all of a sudden I could hear one of my characters (Mary, of all people) saying 'um, HELLO!. Very, very odd. I normally enjoy writing those scenes so much that I can't miss when I get there.